Professor Bennoune and other human rights experts call for cartoonist's release

Professor Karima Bennoune, the U.N. Special Rapporteur in the field of cultural rights, joined other U.N. human rights experts in December in calling for Bangladesh to release celebrated cartoonist Ahmed Kabir Kishore. They cited his “deteriorating health condition." Read the U.N. news release

Kishore was arrested in May after his cartoons satirizing Bangladesh’s response to COVID-19 were posted on Facebook in March and April 2020. He was charged under the 2018 Digital Security Act for spreading false news and misinformation on the country’s COVID-19 response.

Karima Bennoune, Homer G. Angelo and Ann Berryhill Chair and Martin Luther King Jr. Professor of Law, is an author, lecturer, teacher and international law scholar as well as the first Arab American to be honored with the Derrick A. Bell Award from the Section on Minority Groups of the Association of American Law Schools. In 2014, she was awarded the Dayton Literary Peace Prize for her book Your Fatwa Does Not Apply Here: Untold Stories from the Fight against Muslim Fundamentalism (W.W. Norton & Company). In October 2015, she was appointed U.N. Special Rapporteur in the field of cultural rights.  She received the 2016 Rights and Leadership Award from IANGEL, the International Action Network for Gender Equity & Law.